Category Archives: Royalty Rates

We hate to say we told ya so, but… Below is our post from September 2015. Two years ago we predicted the inevitable truth of the all you can eat Spotify subcription model. Like many of our predictionsand proposals (example; windowing titles) we’ve had to wait for the industry to catch up to us. Today, two years later, Digital Music News confirms our prediction.

Read the report from Digital Music News by clicking the headline link here.

Down, down, down it goes, where it stops nobody knows… The monthly average rate per play on Spotify is currently .00408 for master rights holders.

48 Months of Spotify Streaming Rates from Jun 2011 thru May 2015 on an indie label catalog of over 1,500 songs with over 10m plays.

Spotify rates per spin appear to have peaked and are now on a steady decline over time.

Per stream rates are dropping because the amount of revenue is not keeping pace with the number of streams. There are several possible causes:

1) Advertising rates are falling as more “supply” (the number of streams) come on line and the market saturates.

2) The proportion of lower paying “free streams” is growing faster than the proportion of higher paying “paid streams.”

3) All of the above.

This confirms our long held suspicion that as a flat price “freemium” subscription service scales the price per stream will drop. As the service reaches “scale” the pool of streaming revenue becomes a fixed amount. The pie can’t get any larger and adding more streams only cuts the pie into smaller pieces!

The data above is aggregated. In all cases the total amount of revenue is divided by the total number of the streams per service (ex: $4,080 / 1,000,000 = .00408 per stream). Multiple tiers and pricing structures are all summed together and divided to create an averaged, single rate per play.

It’s amazing how long it takes the industry to catch up to us. We strongly suggested windows and pay-gates at ad supported streaming services (Spotify) to drive conversion rates to subscription revenues back in 2014 and again in 2015, twice!

Well guess what is being reported in Digital Music News this week…

“According to details tipped, the Swedish streamer would restrict the biggest album releases to only paid subscribers for a period of time.”

Wow, windowing works! Who knew?!

But here’s the real kicker, the labels are LOWERING royalty rates in exchange for the ability to window hit records! It’s unbelievable that the industry must always take two steps back for every one step forward. Does it really need to be this hard?

If the record industry is serious about growing streaming revenues (and the digital economy in general) it must address the problems with the exploitative practices of Google’s YouTube. We’ve been lucky to be supplied with Content ID data from the same source as our previous data – so we added that into the mix to see where it would rank.

These numbers are just staggering.

If you combine Content ID to the YouTube Subscription numbers you arrive at a whopping 63% of total streaming market share that only contributes 11% of revenue. Ya’ll taking notes here?

Look at the combined YouTube revenues of Subscriptions and Content ID together at 11% of revenue. That puts the combined earnings at #3 in market share behind Apple Music. However, Apple Music creates more earnings than the two combined YouTube Revenue streams with less than 4% of the consumption. You’ll also notice that YouTube is the only streaming service with three zeros following the decimal point. That means YouTube is paying hundreds of dollars per million streams while the other leading streamers are paying thousands.

Apple Music generates 12% of revenue with less than 4% of streams. YouTube generates 11% of revenue with 63% of streams. Does that sound like a problem to anyone else?

As of this writing we’re not factoring in the direct channel uploads for artists to YouTube or Vevo, however we just can’t imagine that those numbers are much different in terms of plays versus revenues. We hear from a lot of label folks that they are afraid to give up their annual revenue from YouTube sources, but all we can say is that you’d be gaining more much more than you would be giving up.

We’ve heard of at least one executive who met with resistance when faced with the prospect of potentially walking away from millions of dollars a year in YouTube revenues. But, it’s not walking away from millions, it’s giving up 10’s of millions in true revenue.

Let us not forget, that this devalued revenue will prevent the overall growth of streaming as a format. With streaming revenues (largely from Spotify and Apple Music) now accounting for approximately 40% of overall digital music revenues why should YouTube be able to pay 1/10th of the other major players? Oh, that’s right because of user pirated content uploads…

It’s time for the record business to get serious about cleaning up YouTube.

We can’t make this up. We’ve stated many times before, as the consumption of streams increase (and those services grow) the per stream rate will drop as revenues level off. This is simply because revenues can not keep up with consumption, and there is no fixed per stream rate.

Spotify has been retaliating against musicians who introduce new material exclusively on rival Apple Music by making their songs harder to find, according to people familiar with the strategy. Artists who have given Apple exclusive access to new music have been told they won’t be able to get their tracks on featured playlists once the songs become available on Spotify, said the people, who declined to be identified discussing the steps. Those artists have also found their songs buried in the search rankings of Spotify, the world’s largest music-streaming service, the people said. Spotify said it doesn’t alter search rankings.

Contrast that to the plight of songwriters. There would be no music business without the fundamental efforts of songwriters. Yet, there is not a free market in songs. The federal government sets compensation for songwriters/publishers based on a percentage of revenue. An abysmal below market rate. In effect a subsidy for streaming services. Last I checked this rate was working out to about $0.00058 per spin. This includes both the public performance (BMI/ASCAP) and the streaming mechanical (IF they happen to pay it).

Best case scenario, if a songwriter retains all publishing rights to their song then a songwriter would need 288,104,634.15 spins to earn the reported average salary of a Spotify employee.

Any questions?

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Related see this post on failure of techies to understand that streaming services are subsidized by government mandates

Again, many resisted what is just common sense. The record industry always had utilized windows (or windowing as some prefer), but it just looked a little different than the way the film business did it. But it was there, and it always had been there.

This is not a philosophical discussion. This is financial reality. Respected stock analyst Robert Tullo who is the Director Of Research at Albert Fried & Company says this:

Longer term IP Radio and Spotify are good annuity revenue streams and great promotional tools. However, we believe the system works better for everyone when artists have the right to distribute their Intellectual property how they see fit.

Ultimately we think windows for content will form around titles that look much like the Movie Windows and that will be great for investors and the industry as soon as all these so called experts get out of the way and spot trading fashionable digital dimes for real growth and earnings.

So here we are in the spring of 2016. As simple math and economic reality effects more artists, managers and labels first hand the truth becomes self evident.

YouTube is the next windowing battle to a restoring a healthy economic ecosystem for artists. You can’t window if you can’t keep your work off of YouTube. That’s not YouTube, that’s YouLose…

The Problem With Streaming, Is The Problem With Streaming… Mark Mulligan Reports.

“Though the drop was small – 1% – it was still nonetheless a drop at a period when digital spending should be booming. In some key markets the consumer spending decline was significantly larger, such as a 3% fall in the UK.”

“The end goal has changed: Just under a third of free streamers go onto buy the music of artists they discover on these service while 37% simply stream newly discovered artists more. Both use cases will coexist for some time, but with with music purchasing fading phenomenon, the latter will dominate.”

Watch and learn… We can’t make this up. Seriously you have to watch this video.

If we had a nickle for every YouTuber or Tech Journalist that advised musicians that “YouTube” was the SOLUTION TO PIRACY we’d be rich. Really rich. I mean, really, really, really rich. We we’re told YouTube was “promotion” and “exposure” to make money other ways.

We were told how if you just “made stuff people wanted” and “connected with fans” then they would reward you with loyalty and support. Musicians were told they were “whining” about piracy and that they should “adapt and evolve” to the “new way” and just embrace all of this “awesome internet empowered promotion”.

Funny how it is when the shoe is on the other foot. See here’s the thing. All of these YouTuber’s make money from the advertising that runs on their YouTube videos. But when those videos are ripped from YouTube by fans and uploaded to Facebook guess who doesn’t get paid? Yup, you guessed it… the YouTuber’s are getting stiffed and they don’t like it.

Where is Larry Lessig to help these folks out? Remember kids, don’t break the internet! It’s “sharing economy” afterall. You do the work and silicon valley shares the profits.

Soooo… when a musician’s work is pirated on Napster, Grockster, Kazaa, Limewire, The Pirate Bay, oh and YouTube… Musicians should “get over it”. But when a YouTuber’s work, labor and creative output is devalued, or worse monetized by a third party (Facebook) who doesn’t pay them anything, well then, you know, that’s “bad”.

But then they ran into a problem known as “freebooting,” which entails republishing videos on social sites without the consent of the folks who made the clips. In essence, it’s a practice of intellectual-property theft that’s plagued Facebook more than other digital platforms—PR-wise, at least—in recent months thanks to a few whistle-blowers.

They go on…

“I spent roughly a week issuing take downs on Facebook—a convoluted process,” Neistat told Adweek. “I crowdsourced the process of finding the freebooters because there is no way to search Facebook. In all, I took down well over 50 different posts—[which was] not nearly all of them. I simply gave up after a while. I anecdotally kept track of the view counts—over 20 million views on the videos I took down.”

According to a recent report from Ogilvy and Tubular Labs, of the 1000 most popular Facebook videos of Q1 2015, 725 were stolen re-uploads. Just these 725 “freebooted” videos were responsible for around 17 BILLION views last quarter. This is not insignificant, it’s the vast majority of Facebook’s high volume traffic. And no wonder, when embedding a YouTube video on your company’s Facebook page is a sure way to see it die a sudden death, we shouldn’t be surprised when they rip it off YouTube and upload it natively.

• On July 19, Chen wrote to Hurley and Karim: “Jawed, please stop putting stolen videos on the site. We’re going to have a tough time defending the fact that we’re not liable for the copyrighted material on the site because we didn’t put it up when one of the co-founders is blatantly stealing content from from other sites and trying to get everyone to see it.” Four days later, Karim sent a link to the other founders, and Hurley told him that if they rejected it, they needed to reject all copyrighted material. Karim’s reply: “I say we reject this one but not the others. This one is totally blatant.”

• A July 29 email conversation about competing video sites laid out the importance to YouTube of continuing to use the copyrighted material. “Steal it!” Chen said , and got a reply from Hurley, “hmmm, steal the movies?” Chen’s answer: “we have to keep in mind that we need to attract traffic. how much traffic will we get from personal videos? remember, the only reason our traffic surged was due to a video of this type.”

Everyone’s creativity deserves to be protected. All creators should be united against the illegal, infringing and exploitative uses of their work (especially for profit) without consent or compensation.